Any one who has given thought to the study of modern social phenomena will understand at once how enormously our labour and racial problem, being interlaced in this way, complicates our whole social condition, and how almost helpless it throws South Africa into the hands of the Jew or Christian foreign speculator. Let us give a concrete example. In a town called Kimberley there is the richest diamond mine in the earth, once the property of South Africans and belonging to multitudes of them, but now fallen into the hands of a powerful syndicate of Jews, Englishmen, and others, who, with the exception of a couple of South Africans, all reside wholly or mainly out of South Africa, and whose power is so enormous that they are able, by a mere expression of their will, to return eight or ten men to the Cape Parliament, irrespective of the wishes of the community. The action of this powerful syndicate has long formed a source of disease and corruption in South African public and social life, and the question is often asked, why the working men and other inhabitants of Kimberley and such places as the company dominates submit to this dictation? It is not so, as is sometimes supposed, because the skilled workmen and overseers in the great company are inferior to their compatriots in Europe in their love of freedom or independence; for they are, on the whole, picked men, and many of them are strongly democratic and freedom-loving; it is certainly not because the inhabitants of Kimberley are more indifferent to their manhood, or more willing to deliver up their right to exercise the franchise into the hands of a small knot of Jews and Speculators than other men; but because the forces opposed to them are so overpowering compared to their own that they feel crushed. Were the thousands of working men labouring in the mines white and not black, and could they freely combine with the skilled European overseers and the townsmen, the monopoly of the power would be snapped in twenty-four hours. They would refuse to go into compounds, they would demand higher wages and the right to spend them where they pleased, and to vote for their own representatives, and the power for evil of the great company would be broken. But the bulk of the workmen being black, and any attempt to organize or combine them being at once met with the cry "Black-men combining," the handful of skilled English workmen and townsmen are powerless. Our situation is very grave, and differs radically for the worse from that of all other lands where kindred problems have to be faced. We have nothing to fall back upon but the fierce and indomitable love of freedom in a certain section of our farming population.